Reviews

IC Markets Review 2023 - The Good and the Bad

By Stefano Treviso, Updated on: Apr 07 2023.

IC Markets in a Nutshell

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IC Markets in 60 seconds

• Above average asset offering when compared to similar brokers (2000+)
• Competitive spreads and commissions in their RAW spreads account (average 0 to 0.3 pips and $7 commission per lot round turn)
• Multi-platform offering (MetaTrader 4 & 5, cTrader and also copy trading options by MyFxBookAutotrade and ZuluTrade)

IC Markets is an Australian broker with a global presence specialising in Forex trading. One of their greatest advantages is providing RAW spread accounts with interbank pricing.

IC Markets Full Review

Here’s what we’ll talk about during our review: 

• Is IC Markets Safe?
• IC Markets Minimum Deposit and Withdrawal
• IC Markets Account Types
• IC Markets Trading Fees
• IC Markets Available Assets
• IC Markets Trading Platforms
• IC Markets Research and Analysis Tools
• IC Markets Educational Tools
• Verdict

Is IC Markets Safe?

IC Markets is a safe and regulated broker that holds 3 financial licenses. Let’s go through each one of them:

• CySec (Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission)
• ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission)
• FSAS (Financial Services Authority of the Seychelles)

When it comes to regulation, IC Markets its below its main competitors as only one of its 3 licenses is a top-tier one (ASIC).

For IC Markets to increase their reputation, they must acquire other financial licenses from the highest ranked regulators and of course, not acquire any more low score licenses.

IC Markets Minimum Deposit and Withdrawal

IC Markets has a minimum deposit requirement of $200 and does not charge any fees for adding funds. Here are their deposit and withdrawal methods:

• Credit and Debit Cards (Visa or Mastercard)
• Bank Transfer
• Paypal
• Skrill
• Neteller
• Sofort
• Bitcoin (Cryptocurrency)

It’s important to note that not all payment methods are available in all locations, there can always be some variations due to regulatory constraints.

Base Currencies

IC Markets supports the following base currencies:

• United States Dollar
• Great British Pound
• Australian Dollar
• Canadian Dollar
• Euro
• Singapore Dollar
• Japanese Yen
• Hong Kong Dollar
• Swiss Franc
• New Zealand Dollar

A great positive point for IC Markets is that they don’t charge any withdrawal fees.

Deposit and Withdrawal Process

Being a multi-platform broker, IC Markets offers their own account management dashboard (client area) where customers are able to perform anything account-related such as: opening new accounts, deposits and withdrawals, contacting support, etc.

To make a deposit or request a withdrawal, simply log in to your client area account from IC Markets website and check the left panel for the withdrawal and deposit options.

A very interesting point to note about this area is that we’re not a big fan at all of the “Downloads” area. This was our experience:

When you open any account with a MetaTrader or cTrader broker, it's a normal practise to receive an email with your login details for the platform and some download links along with web access as well. Here’s how that email looks:

Our objective was to pretend we lost the email and try to log in to IC Markets web trader. The most obvious choice for us was of course looking through the website to try and find a “WebTrader” option. When we found it, it turned out that no matter how many times we tried to go around it, it ended up just pointing us to open a new account.

After more searching through the client area, we decided to contact support. One of IC Markets officer pointed us to the downloads area, which looks like this:

In the downloads area, there will be a section for each platform and that’s where you’ll be able to find the “Webtrader” option for each platform. In our views of how platforms or websites should be, we believe that “Downloading” something means taking it off the internet into your computer or device.

Accessing a WebTrader is not at all a download.

We’re definitely advising IC Markets to design a better client area experience to ensure that new traders don’t get lost when trying to perform simple actions like accessing a platform.

IC Markets Account Types

Asides from the traditional Standard and Professional accounts offered to European traders due to ESMA’s legislation, IC Markets offers the following account types:

When it comes to account types, IC Markets has a decent offer to distinguish between average and high volume traders.

Traders that require to execute big positions or scalping are definitely well served with IC Markets Raw Spread account, as the spread cost reduces to a minimum and they only pay in-and-out fixed commissions.

IC Markets Trading Fees

IC Markets charges spreads (difference between buy and sell prices), overnight fees (the cost of maintaining open a leveraged position more than a day).

Spreads

IC Markets spreads can vary depending on the account type you have. For the sake of this comparison, we’re basing ourselves in the standard account which has no commission against similar choices from competitors.

As you can see, when it comes to currency spreads, IC Markets is a great choice and lives up to the industry standards set by similar brokers.

It’s very important to note that IC Markets is definitely a great choice for currency, commodities and indices traders but when it comes to other asset classes, there are more competitive choices out there.

Commissions & Fees

Brokers like IC Markets or Pepperstone have special account types where spreads can be close to 0 most of the time and for that benefit, they charge a commission per lot round turn, which is basically a sophisticated way to say: “in-and-out commission”.

Let’s compare IC Markets against other similar choices:

IC Markets Available AssetsIC Markets is definitely at the same level as its competitors when it comes to low spread accounts with commission which are definitely a great choice for high volume traders.

IC Markets has a moderately competitive asset offering when compared to similar brokers. Let’s take a look at what they offer:

As you can see from the table above, IC Markets set themselves as a decent overall alternative when it comes to asset offering yet there are some very important points to take into consideration when trading assets other than forex, indices and commodities:

IC Markets charges a $22 monthly data subscription per user to get the data feed for ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) shares and a $7 AUD roundtrip commission (in-and-out) on each trade.

When compared to any of its competitors, it’s expensive.

When it comes to stock trading, there are better choices out there, but when it comes to Currencies, Commodities and Indices, IC Markets is definitely one of the leading brokers.

IC Markets Trading Platforms

IC Markets is a multi-platform broker that offers MetaTrader and cTrader as its main choices. Both platforms are created by independent companies so we’re not going to review them as a proprietary creation of IC Markets but rather just point out a few benefits of them. 

IC Markets MetaTrader 4 & 5

IC Markets offers both MetaTrader 4 and 5 in the following formats:

• Web trader
• Desktop Apps (Windows & Mac)
• Mobile Apps (Android and IOS)

Clearly any trader familiar with MetaTrader will find IC Markets' proposal very convenient.

IC Markets cTrader

IC Markets offers cTrader in the following formats:

• Web trader
• Desktop App for Windows
• Mobile Apps (Android and IOS)

In terms of functionality and convenience, we definitely find cTrader a more appealing platform than MetaTrader but ultimately, it boils down to each trader’s choice.

Something very important to point out is that IC Markets also offers its own separate app for client management activities (both on Android and IOS).

Additional Platforms

IC Markets partnered with other third party platforms to offer a few different services to its customers. Here is the list:

• MyFxBookAutotrade
• ZuluTrade

Both services provide interesting workarounds for social trading and copy trading, which means that new traders can simply copy the trading activity from other more experienced traders into their MetaTrader platforms.

Nowadays, copy trading became a popular thing thanks to brokers like eToro which took it mainstream through a fully integrated solution built on their platform but still, when it comes to accurateness of data, services like MyFXBookAutotrade definitely present a very appealing offer as users still retain control of their platforms by having a clear separation between:

• The broker
• The platform
• The copy trading service

IC Markets Research and Analysis Tools

IC Markets has a very little to offer when it comes to proprietary research and analysis tools. After a thorough look, we were only able to find the following:

• Market Analysis Blog
• Economic Calendar

The market analysis blog is a well-styled page with a daily outlook of the markets mostly basing themselves on the most popular currency pairs. Their analysis mostly consists of detecting key support and resistance levels for each asset with a chart and a brief description on each asset.

Asides from the elements mentioned above, IC Markets being a MetaTrader and cTrader broker, offers the possibility to integrate additional tools to the platforms such as:

• Expert Advisors like (Alarm Managers, Correlation Matrix, Correlation Trader, Sentiment Trader)
• Custom Indicators such as: Donchian, Chart-in-Chart and many more

In the end, the above possibilities are something to thank the platform creators for as they had a vision of allowing people to develop their own tools and deploy them with ease for any user.

IC Markets Educational Tools

When it comes to education, IC Markets offers the following:

• Several blog articles spread out through different areas of their website covering the basics of trading
• A few video tutorials on getting started with MetaTrader
• A forex glossary
• Their own PodCast called IC your trade
• Webinars

After carefully reviewing IC Markets educational tools, we found the most interesting to be the podcast and the webinars as they provide valuable and interesting up-to-date information. All the other tools were not useful at all as there are much better free resources out there on youtube.

Verdict

Overall, IC Markets is a great MetaTrader and cTrader broker. They did an outstanding job in crafting competitive account offers to distinguish low volume and high volume traders with their RAW Spreads account.

IC Markets main highlights are:

• RAW spreads account (from 0 to 0.3 Pips on average) with a $7 commission per lot round turn
• Multi-platform environment (MetaTrader and cTrader)
• Above average asset offering when compared to other similar brokers (2000 +)
• Several options available for skilled traders to implement automated strategies thanks to their platform selection

On the negative side, IC Markets' client area needs improvement as its not intuitive and easy to use, they charge high commissions for stock trading and their regulatory framework can definitely be improved.

IC Markets is a great choice for advanced Forex traders looking to benefit from their RAW spreads account offering.